Oh Grace,

We have a whole world of designers to draw on, lets not limit ourselves to a bare-bones UX. I'm sure someone here (or more likely everyone working together) can come up with something that is functional, even function enhancing and that looks great. Xara helps artists create great art, and I think their tools should be beautiful as well.

Maybe if you can give the designers some idea of the process the user goes through to:

  • discover what the program does
  • find out can be changed,
  • how they choose/select/signal to you that a change is requested ( can a user make more than one change at a time ie check a bunch of boxes and hit submit),
  • what kind of feed back they can get to confirm what they are about or will do?
  • how they exit the program
  • what kind of warnings or advisories they might get
  • etc.
I'm going to open a new thread for the app UX. Maybe you can give us a list of the things you need to show and what feedback you need to get from the user to make anything happen.

Lets really work our imaginations here. Does the application frame, chrome interface even have to be a rectangle?

As for colors, Greens, Golds Oranges could be good. Even for the most common kind of color blind users they won't turn to blue.

http://www.visibone.com/colorblind/ Great resource.

http://www.usability.gov/articles/newsletter/pubs/022010new.html#ColorsthatWorktheBest

I've copied this post to the from the Design a Logo for XaRT thead. If you are posting about UX design post here. Logo and logo colors post in the Design a Logo for XaRT thead